Publications

I have published articles on medieval and early modern genealogy in some of the leading journals in Great Britain and the United States and have several more currently in progress.

Publications in Print

A Genealogy of the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond. Foundations: The Journal of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy 2.3 (January 2007): 171-189.

From 1204 to 1461 the modern Turkish city of Trabzon was the centre of a Byzantine state known as the empire of Trebizond. Its rulers, the Grand Komnenoi, have long been under scrutiny by genealogists as a potential gateway between medieval Europe and the cultures to the east, but the complexity and fragmentary nature of the surviving documentation made reconstruction of their genealogy a herculean task. This, the fullest and most recent study of the Trapezuntine emperors, won the 2006 Charles F H Evans Award for best new paper in medieval genealogy worldwide and was subsequently singled out in The Best Genealogical Sources In Print (Boston, 2012) as one of the most important articles of the decade.

An open access version of this article is available here. Members of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy can view the article online and the relevant back issue can be ordered from the Foundation for £6.

Jacques de Lusignan was a medieval Cypriote nobleman whose ancestry was deeply rooted in the Crusader states founded after the First Crusade. This article was the first comprehensive study of his ancestry, using the format pioneered by Neil D. Thompson and Charles M. Hansen in their seminal "A Medieval Heritage: The Ancestry of Charles II, King of England" to systematically identify his forebears across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.

The Scottish Ancestry of Patrick and William Stewart of the Carolinas, The American Genealogist, 80.1 (January 2005): 11-22.

In 1763 Patrick Stewart of Ledcreich, a Scottish laird who had immigrated to North Carolina over twenty years earlier, compiled his genealogy. The resulting manuscript was passed down in his family and is now lost, but multiple copies survive. In this article I collated the variant readings of the known copies and compared them with the documentary record in Scotland, producing the first accurate published account of this historic Scottish-American family.